On Friday, February 13, 2009, The ABA Journal emailed me its Weekly Newsletter.  The featured blog on the American Bar Association Journal's newsletter (which is also on the ABA Journal's website) was shockingly obscene, offensive, sexist and inappropriate on the American Bar Association's website.  The ABA emailed the blog to its members as part of its Weekly Newsletter email.  The ABA handpicks a few blogs (which it refer to as "blawgs") and features them on its website for the entertainment and/or informational benefit of its members.  The ABA is the industry organization for all attorneys in the USA and is the world's largest professional organization so it is supposed to be very ethical and dignified in representing all attorneys.  The blog the ABA Journal selected as "This Week's Featured Blawg" is titled "Sweet Hot Justice" and summarizes its content as "what it's really like to whore yourself out to Biglaw" and features a woman's mouth wearing bright red, glossy lipstick and biting down on a sheet of paper.  One of the entries on this blog, titled "Pervert, Esq. Part 2" is written by a female junior associate who is having sex with the Biglaw partner for whom she works.  In the blog entry she writes that her partner/boss asked her in bed to "strap on" a dildo and "ram him in the ass with a pink prosthetic cock and god only knows what else."  The entry ends with the young associate regretting that she did not comply with the partner's request that she wear a dildo and perform anal sex on him since he punished her for declining his request by criticizing her work and making her work late at the office. She writes: "And you know what, part of me wonders if I should have just bore down, strapped on the thing and went to town on old Ian.  Maybe then I'd be sipping rosé champagne now instead of sitting bleary eyed in the middle of the night in my rat-hole office.  I mean, hell, it's not like it's such a big deal anyway, right?  After all, if I've learned
anything in the past couple of days, it's that like it or not, when you work in BigLaw, sooner or later you wind up taking it in the ass." 
 
Not only is the term "whore" used in the blog's summary heading but one blog entry titled "A Rose by Any Other Name" states that women who work at law firms only receive large bouqets of flowers in exchange for "blow jobs" and repeatedly refers to flower bouquets "Whore Flowers".  The blogger mentions another female associate who received a large bouquet (a/k/a "Whore Flowers") recently and states that surely the bouquet resulted from the attorney "whoring" herself and providing sexual favors to a new male. 

Here are some more excerpts from "Sweet Hot Justice" -- the website the ABA chose to "feature" on the ABA Journal website".  Both of these are comments after the "A Rose By Any Other Name" posting. These are exact, word-for-word postings from "Sweet Hot Justice" -- the ABA's featured website:
 
"Guys who get cosmic sex with a decent woman are generally appreciative, but when you can find a sourpuss big firm lawyer like “Annelise,” and then can bang the living shit out of her for hours (getting multiple blowjobs along the way), it’s well worth a lousy $150 bucks for the flowers. Hell, it would cost 4 times that to get a decent call girl, and that bitch wouldn’t even have a law degree."
 
"Any female lawyer that has a half decent body is worth a good roll in the hay, even if her face can stop a clock, like this one. There’s something to be said about screwing a lawyer (after all, lawyers usually screw us), and it doesn’t really matter what she looks like after you turn her upside down. And, If you close your eyes, you can even dream you’re screwing a movie star of your choice. If the female lawyer in question goes ga-ga over some lousy flowers, that’s a cheap guarantee of a repeat performance."
 
 I brought this content to the ABA's attention via email and voicemail.  I left a voicemail for the Editor and Publisher regarding the obscene, offensive and sexist nature of "Sweet Hot Justice" and requested that he remove it from the ABA Journal's website immediately.  The ABA replied to me via email stating that many lawyers find "Sweet Hot Justice" "entertaining" and that it is one of the most popular blogs on the ABA's site!  The ABA informed me that "Sweet Hot Justice" received 400 votes in the Best Blog contest the ABA held.  The ABA also sent me an email confirming that the Editor/Publisher and the managing publisher were aware of my complaint and the content of the blog. 

I also emailed the offensive content to the president of the ABA, Mr. H. Thomas Wells, Jr. and have yet to receive a reply.  

It is shocking that in 2009, such blatant sexist and raunchy material would be featured as popular and entertaining on the ABA site. Is the ABA so desperate for business and to increase membership that it has decided to get on the internet porn bandwagon?

What if someone wrote a very popular blog that had a racist tone to it (such as a blog supposedly written by an anonymous black lawyer who writes about not being as smart or hardworking as white lawyers?) Would this be seen as satire and entertainment and featured on the ABA site because it is "popular".  Unfortunately, racist and ethnic jokes are popular amoung some but that would not make it acceptable for the ABA Journal.

Last night, after I made several calls to the ABA complaining about the obscene content, the ABA emailed me that they have removed the blog because the CEO "understands the nature of my concerns". The ABA refused to issue the apology or correction on its website that I requested.  I noticed in the email the ABA also refuses to say that the CEO or Publisher agreed the content was offensive.  So while they didn't mind emailing "Sweet Hot Justice" to all the members, the ABA will not email an apology or retraction email.  I am concerned about all the thousands of attorneys who may have read "Sweet Hot Justice" and its sexist, offensive content and what damage that causes.  I feel that the ABA had an ethical obligation to issue an apology for those that were offended and perhaps damaged by that content.  I am saddened and disappointed that the ABA tried to defend the offensive content and at first refused to remove the blog from its site.